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A Lost Soul
A Lost Soul is the first episode of the first series of The Zany Adventures of Ho-Ip, written by The Boy Who Cried Godzilla . It establishes Ho-Ip's origins and sets up upcoming characters. Synopsis After a Baphometic Cult tried to recreate their God, they were horribly surprised when Ho-Ip, a lovable lump of questionable sentience, came out. Baphomet was particularly amused and made Ho-Ip his new vessel. But the company that created the technology Ho-Ip was made from is planning something in the shadows. Story The clouds rolled lazily across the middle range of windows on the tower that belonged to Zagnacrouft Industries. Those in the top floors could just as easily pick out shapes in the fluffy white forms as those on the ground. But hundreds of thousands of feet below even them, far under the lowest basement of the mirrored tower, it was a time of celebration for the Order. “How goes it?” asked a uniformed creature with scaly lips and protruding eyes after exiting the vacuum of the airlock and entering the low, dome-ceilinged chamber of one of the industry’s labs. “They just shipped out.” replied the equine thing at the console overlooking the shallow sunken portion of the room hosting three, recently emptied, manipulation tubes, “You got what the doctor ordered?” it asked, spinning its chair around to face his colleague. “Double triple broungschlacht on a raft, paint it red and let it swim?” asked the reptile, holding the wrapped sandwich out to the technician. He took it graciously from his friend and began to devour it hungrily. “You’re disgusting, you know that Zascht-Qom?” chuckled the chameleon as he sat down with his own revolting concoction. That was when the wasp in the janitor’s smock saw his chance. He pulled his cap down over his face to hide his tattoos as much as his face, and pushed the cart through the double doors opposite the airlock, and into the room where Zascht-Qom and his companion were enjoying their late dinner, no doubt catered from some deli up top. Luckily any notice they took of him was quickly overpowered by their repulsive sandwiches. Clearly they had not enjoyed anything so tasteful for some time. Sweat made his hands slip on the handle of the cleaning trolley, but he kept hold. Now was not the time for error. He was nearly home free. When the elevator arrived on the main floor, he pushed his cart to a back portion of the main hall and tried to look absent minded as he started to sponge the floor. Inside he felt like he might explode, and he suspected that what he was carrying there had something to do with it. It was like everything he had ever felt was occurring inside him at once. Fear, anxiety, paranoia: all the things he thought he had left behind worked with a pounding headache, lightheadedness, and a slew of other symptoms he couldn’t think hard enough to name. He slowly made his way to the janitor’s closet, mopping the odd floor, and scrubbing the odd bathroom so as to not arouse suspicion, but as soon as he got there, the smock and cap hit the floor as he leapt into the ceiling vent he had entered hours earlier. How long had he been inside? Certainly not as long as it had felt. He crawled through the constricting air vents, every miniscule noise ringing like alarm bells in his brain until he could smell the air of the street. He pushed the grate aside and barely managed to land on his feet, his wings flapping desperately in an attempt to balance himself. The van at the back of the alley sat in darkness before a small beam of colored light came from inside. They were safe. Ba-Zen climbed into the side door. When they were sure they had not been followed, the driver turned to ask with a hint of excitement lurking in his caution, “Did you get it?” The wasp nodded and allowed his esophagus to expand for the first time in what felt like forever, and their prize forced its way up out of his mouth. He began to gasp and cough violently as the canister hit the floor. “Through your service, brother, a new era will rise from the ashes he will leave behind.” He turned to face his companion. His tattoos shining in the red light looming over them from some sign or other. “I do what I can. His will be done.” replied the wasp. “His will be done.” Years Later “Lord Archdeacon, it is ready,” said a confident horned man from deep inside his hood. Archdeacon Pi-Oh looked up from his ancient volume, his face cloaked entirely by his hood. His eyes glowed the same unfeeling red they always had, but his antennae twitched with interest, “He is ready, young one. Our Lord returns to us this night.” His patronly monotone betrayed the obvious excitement in the way he scuttled out of the room on his presumably insectoid legs. Hooded heads bowed as Pi-Oh entered the main chamber, at the center of which was a glowing stasis tube hosting the infant Ohpinian which they had grown from his very cells. Pi-Oh felt a sensation of pride in knowing that he, or his son rather, would be the vessel to usher in the new era. “Raise your heads, oh loyal few! For I have never been deserving of such reverence, such loyalty, such admiration! Tonight we begin the next and final chapter in the book that is all of Ohpinia. The wretched Order shall soon meet its end, and thus shall balance be restored when our lord Baphomet is returned to the mortal realms! By his rule, forever shall we be free from the confines they have kept us in since our births and the births of our elders, and their elders before! The time is now, his anointed! Shall we all be blessed in his glory, his omnipotence, his valor”, he preached to screams of approval and applause that magnified itself on the carved stone walls, filling the chambers with the great rumbling of a thousand electrical storms. At that point, some anointed technicians began to carry out the process that their insectoid brother Ba-Zen had stolen so long ago. The cloning was not the hardest part of the process. The followers of Baphomet had insisted that Pi-Oh’s genes be woven into the vessel as to maintain his devout rites and knowledge to sweeten the sacrifice. It had been his honor to oblige. And so the child had grown, and primed for the procedure as the pilfered documents described. The collector probes of antiquity gave them the finishing touch: the DNA of the “Go-at”: a creature of the deep cosmos often used to describe aspects of Baphomet in the ancient texts from beyond the stars. Surely He would accept their offering. It would be perfect for Him. They served His will, and were His loyal servants. Through their work He would return,and through His work would balance be restored. In the clamor of praise, a bolt of red electricity built and surged through the machinery to signal that the final phase was beginning.The room reeked of burning air as the technology worked its magic,and before them, in the draining incubator tube they saw their God. The perfect body was still an infant, but its form struck the cultists with awe. Long horns of keratin shot back from its head above velvety ears. It’s bulbous eyes of youth were closed as it began to squirm against its new environment as the fluid drained. It stood on furry brown haunches like no-one had ever seen. It was a first form child, and yet had in many ways become more than any fully adapted third form adult. With the tank dry, Pi-Oh reached in to hold the thing of beauty high. “Oh great Baphomet, look upon the fruit of our labors and bless us with your presence! Through you and you alone shall we restore balance to this broken Ohpinia! Great Baphomet hear our cry and take this, my son Pi-Bes,so named in your honor to be your body in this new era of enlightenment!” “GraAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaGggggggHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhHHHH” wailed Baphomet’s new vessel, cutting short his father’s speech The joyousness drained from Pi-Oh as he looked more closely at his wailing newborn. It sounded nothing like the infantile mewling of a proper baby. Underneath his dark cowl, Pi-Oh’s expression shifted from confusion to a bitter scowl of hopeless disgust. The baby, if it could be called that, seemed at first glance to have partially melted in its time out of the incubation tube. The splice had been a failure in every sense of the word. It’s sickly pale-green flesh was sagging and lumpy with a texture akin to rotting fruit. It’s eyes were bulging and misshapen, facing opposite directions, and its teeth were like a network of cave formations in their mismatch of half-formed mounds of any kind of tooth imaginable. But beyond that, there was not the slightest spark of sentience, sapience, or understanding of any kind. Out of fear as much as disgust, Pi-Oh threw him to the floor, where he lay motionless. “Get that abomination out of my sight. This is no Baphomet. This is no Pi-Bes. This is nothing. This is imbalance of the cruelest sort!”, and he ran toward the tall double doors. The door to his study slammed behind him as the entire cult was forced to watch the mutant child they had created lay face down on the sandy stone floor. Utterly dejected, the wasp then cradled the misshapen child that had been his life’s work. What could be done for it now? Dump it in the water? Send it to the incinerators? Nothing about it felt right to Ba-Zen. Baphomet had been his savior. He had refused their offering, but what did that mean for the two of them? Pi-Bes or no Pi-Bes, this was still an image of Baphomet. A proper burial was all that could be said for the-- That’s when he heard the faint rasping of painful breaths being drawn from mutated lungs. Pi-Bes was alive. “It’s alive.” exhaled Ba-Zen, just barely audible even to himself in the still silent chamber. “Pi-Bes is alive!” he said, just loud enough for the followers to hear, careful not to let Pi-Oh hear in the other room, “Perhaps… Perhaps he truly is a vessel of Baphomet! How else could something like this survive?” A follower from the crowd scoffed in an attempt to mask their terror. “Pi-Bes? The return of Baphomet? Fantasies all! We disrupted the balance by making that thing, and this is His punishment! Pi-Oh did not make a divine vessel, or a son, or even an animal! It’s… it’s Ho-Ip! A testament to the very opposite of his work!” Another voice cried out. “How are we to set this right? Will the Baphomet even guide us?” “How could we be led so astray?”, voices began to argue “It must be dealt with at once! A sacrifice to our lord!” “Murder is imbalance!” “The thing itself is imbalance!” The engineers were already demolishing the stasis tube in panicked repentance for their breach of balance, and those that weren’t on the production end were begging on hands and knees for Baphomet’s forgiveness. In the rumbling chaos of the echoing chamber, Pi-Bes squirmed a bit in Ba-Zen’s arms. Fearing the thing would start to scream, he hurried himself, babe in arms to the same black van that had taken those blueprints from Zagnacrouft those many years ago, and they floated off with no real destination in mind. It was midday when the van stopped. Ba-Zen liked what he saw here. Far out from anyplace he might be seen, just as the wide meadows began to melt into light forests. This was the place. Ba-Zen picked up the pitiful creature. There was no way it could be raised as a child, but its Ohpinioid features would make giving it to a zoo or something impossible. At least out here it had a chance, however miniscule it might be. For whatever short life it had left to live, he would live it free. “Here you go Pi-Bes”, consoled Ba-Zen, setting the beast on the gravelly transport path. Although the name sounded ridiculous even to the insectoid man’s more sympathetic ears. Pi-Oh wouldn’t want his family name attached to such a thing, and honestly Ba-Zen wasn’t sure he wanted it to be associated with him. “Maybe you were just Ho-Ip all along. There’s no shame in that, really. Brother Pi-Oh is a great and wise man, but...”, Ba-Zen shook the thoughts from his head. If he really had a point he was trying to reach, which he suspected he didn’t, it was lost on “Ho-Ip”’s ears. At that point Ba-Zen noticed that the goat boy had been completely sedentary in all of the time he’d been talking to him. Standing completely still right where he had been set down. Realizing for the final time that it was a futile sentiment to talk to the thing, he patted i on the head, feeling the lumpy air-dried skin, and the miniscule fur fibers poking through it for a moment. He paused to look at it once more in the odd and glassy eyes before returning to the van and floating off down the road. Ho-Ip clumsily turned on its cloven hooves and watched as the only Ohpinian he had ever interacted with left him in his rear monitor feed, and felt nothing. He began an aimless meandering that took him into the shade of a nearby tree, from whose shade he tottered out into the light again and looked up at the sun. The searing light caused him great pain, but he knew not how to remedy it. The pain only grew in intensity. Itching, burning, cooking, blinding, and yet the beast did nothing. The rasp of its breath continued at its steady pace as the sky turned into blackness. A single bolt of vermillion came like a spear from the sky, striking the child-beast with energy enough to liquify the strongest of creatures. It should have caused wildfires they would fight for centuries, and yet all was as it had been when Ba-Zen had arrived there. Ho-Ip then waddled on its twitching legs into the forest, unable to be aware of any change within him. Unknowing that he had fulfilled his purpose. Within his misshapen, abomination of a body, now rested the power to restore the balance. Zagnacrouft Industries’ splicing efforts had achieved dramatically different results. In their years of work they had found that splice-mutation was no simple task. For years they worked, unstitching genes, replacing them, and stitching them back together, and they had made some incredible strides, leading to some quite impressive results. Although Zagnacrouft itself, like most everything else was simply a means. For the highest ups in the organization known colloquially as “The Order”, it had served its purpose. There was nothing more that their scientists could offer in the way of mutations. Their own people could do it better in half the time now. Thanks in no small part to Zagnacrouft’s efforts. The irony of this was not lost on the Grandmaster of The Order as he arranged for a little “gas leak” in one of the gene labs. It was quick for the assassins. Their years of performing such high-level operations made no task of it. An engineer came in and left, and somehow the room was flooded with horribly misdirected toxic chemicals just as the doors malfunctioned. Pity. When the pair of hooves plodded into the room, it was clear of the horrible vapor. Looking down it saw the two technicians, their eyes nearly out of their sockets and their faces twisted in unspeakable pure and unadulterated agony. One of them kicked the corpses lightly to determine that they were really dead before the hooves’ owner tossed the dead technicians over its massive furry shoulders and took them with him into the airlock to disappear into the elevator. No more loose ends. Appearances Monsters *Ho-Ip *Pi-Oh *Baphomet Gallery Ho-Ip.png|Ho-Ip Pi-Oh 212.png|Pi-Oh Baphomet.png|Baphomet Ba-Zen Shrouded.png|Ba-Zen Category:Fanfiction Category:The Boy Who Cried Godzilla's Stories Category:The Zany Adventures of Ho-Ip (series)